lifegears wrote:Oh, and how about integrating your software "Rip" in the Decibel App? I think that can be useful, like "ripping from cd and directly integrate it in the Decibel library".
I think that 24€ are enought for and update like that, aren't they?

My goal with Decibel is to produce a top-quality audio player without a lot of feature creep. I think that features such as file conversion, CD ripping, etc., are best left to separate apps.

Ok your goal it's that one, but you already have two software with great CD rip like Max and Rip, your already have the code.
I think that in the world of integration and simplicity ripping directly in Decibel library may be a very useful feature. And let me say that there are many and many people outside, waiting for a software that replace iTunes in all of its features.

sbooth wrote:

lifegears wrote:In addition, software like Enqueue are growing fast and dont' allow too much time for the updates.

This is probably true, but please keep in mind that both Enqueue and Sonora use my audio playback engine. I've spent hundreds of hours developing and tweaking the code that actually performs the playback. The other players only have UI code to worry about, whereas I've written everything.

I doesn't know that the playback engine was yours, good job. So now you can take some "ispiration" from the Enqueue library for Decibel ones, it seems a right think.

Another thing, but take this one as IMHO. Having 2 different project that do the same thing like Decibel/Play and Max/Rip it's a waste of time and energy. If you merge (Max with Rip) or stop the development of one of the two (like Play), i think that you can have more suggestion, less questions from users and less bugs.

I have a large library of FLAC files (used with a Squeezebox Transporter) and am looking for a librarian/player for my Mac. I am currently using Enqueue (and have been quite happy with it) but am very impressed by the improved sound quality of Decibel. I would like to switch to Decibel if you could add the following features:

1) A multi-pane browser allowing one to filter by Genre/Artist/Album similar to iTunes or Enqueue.

2) Ability to set and sort by Star Rating. (For my workflow I also need a way to query/set the rating from a script. Since Enqueue uses an SQLite database, I am able to grab the ratings via Python which works great.)

3) Expose more metadata in the Inspector window. I need to see the FLAC tags DESCRIPTION (or COMMENT), and BPM.

With all the problems happening with remasters/reissues coming out that are nothing more than overly loud versions of previous mixes with digital clipping compromising sonics, it would be nice to have a digital clipping indicator so we know when what we are listening to has been pushed so "loud" that there's actual digital clipping in the signal.

My "dream" digital clipping indicator would have both a real-time indicator and an accumulative "counter" that would count clipping episodes in 1 track or the current playlist (user selectable). The real time indicator would have perhaps a "green light" for no digital clipping, a yellow light for mild digital clipping, and a red light for more severe digital clipping. "No Clipping" would be defined as no more than ONE sample hitting the maximum value for 16, 20, or 24 bit music. You have to figure a single sample at the max value simply means that levels were assigned properly for the disc. "Mild clipping" would be 2-4 samples in a row at the max value for the 16, 20 or 24 bit data. "Severe clipping" would be 5 or more samples in a row that are all at the same maximum digital value for the 16, 20, or 24 bit data. The clipping indicator feature should also be able to be disabled just to remove the overhead of keeping track of the clipping in real time and in history. It would be FABLOUS if the clipping indicator was in "full playlist mode" if it could apply a green, yellow, or red dot next to each track in the playlist so you could play a newly ripped disc all the way through, perhaps with the system off just to see what the clipping status is. And by "full playlist mode" I'm not really referring to the iTunes interface playlist -- I don't use or do anything with iTunes, I only use Decibel's internal playlist window so, for me, that's the only place I care whether the clipping indicator works or not.

It sure would be great to be able to know without question, just how bad digital clipping is on all these "loud" remasters and newer releases.

lifegears wrote:
Another thing, but take this one as IMHO. Having 2 different project that do the same thing like Decibel/Play and Max/Rip it's a waste of time and energy. If you merge (Max with Rip) or stop the development of one of the two (like Play), i think that you can have more suggestion, less questions from users and less bugs.

I think you're underestimating the amount of time and energy required to merge them

hey stephen
I finally hit the end of my itunes tolerance and your software was featured in a couple different articles.
So i have done the work and listened to a lot of different music comparing
Amarra's free mini trial
Pure music

and finally Decibel.
And it should come as no surprise that Decibel works best for my ears. Nice work.

however I dont really want to deal w another interface and manage the adding all the songs into decibel and without the original playlists etc, because using the itunes remote with the ipad and iphone is just too easy....
...so what i am wondering is.

I realize that this may not be your intent - as it is more to have a stand alone music player...
...but can you not hijack the sound output from itunes and use a toggle to switch the output between similar to what xyz does?

That way you don't have to write the code for the remote etc because itunes would still be the front end.

Will Decibel's sound engine in the future be able to read more different types of cue sheets? So far I really enjoy Decibel's features and design, except that it cannot play a good portion of my cue files the way Vox can...for free. Any plans to address this?

I'd prefer the remote control, since it is a function of playing music. I view Decibel as a player, not a manager, and one of the reasons I bought it was because it was a minimalist player (which is also part of the product description). I'm not a fan of iTunes, but I'd much rather manage my music in iTunes since managing music is just a fraction of the time spent vs. playing music, and I'd prefer to keep the program used for playing music more minimalist. Plus, iTunes does do a decent job a managing music--just not playing music. In any case, I find it odd that there are so many posts essentially saying "I hate iTunes because it is so slow and bloated...please add all the bloated iTunes features to Decibel so I can stop using bloated iTunes". Do people not see the logical flaw here?

Actually, now that Tag is being resurrected, a playlist editor would be a great feature to add to Tag rather than Decibel. Tag is already meant to manage the metadata of your music at the album & track level, so it would make sense to extend that to also manage your metadata at the playlist level. Something to consider...

bluishgreen wrote:In any case, I find it odd that there are so many posts essentially saying "I hate iTunes because it is so slow and bloated...please add all the bloated iTunes features to Decibel so I can stop using bloated iTunes". Do people not see the logical flaw here?

SoundJam by Casady&Greene (anyone here remembers it?) was a great player *and* music files manager. then Apple bought it and iTunes was born

iTunes became boated, afterwards, "thanks" to what was added (store, iPod managing and so on) to that original nucleus: a player and music files manager
(btw: SoundJam was also a great mp3 encoder but no one needs that fuction added to a player anymore)

and yes: I do hate iTunes and do not want to touch it anymore, that's exactly why I also need file managing added to my player of choice

Not a huge deal, but I'd appreciate a thorough User Guide, so we don't have to trawl through the forums, or bug you with repeated questions, to learn some of the finer points of operation and integration with hardware and OS's.